


before the final crack of dawn

by flirtygaybrit



Category: IT (Movies - Muschietti), IT - Stephen King
Genre: (but only barely), Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Conversations That Do Not Take Place, Love Confessions, M/M, Missing Scene
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-10-12
Updated: 2019-10-12
Packaged: 2020-12-13 21:50:43
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,605
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21004718
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/flirtygaybrit/pseuds/flirtygaybrit
Summary: They would leave Derry and Pennywise and the entire goddamn circus clusterfuck that was the summer of 1989, and Eddie was happy.He was positively fucking elated.





	before the final crack of dawn

**Author's Note:**

> Imagine a scene where Bowers isn't waiting in the bathroom and Richie has not yet made his escape, and try to forgive the numerous Bat Out of Hell references.

There was nothing in the world that Eddie wanted more than to get far away from this stupid fucking town.

He could still feel the disgusting sludge from the leper slowly drying to a crust on his face as he strode into the Derry Town House and passed by the concerned-looking shapes of Beverly and Ben, but he paid them no mind. He took the stairs calmly and cautiously, one at a time, and his shoes slapped wetly against the floor as he made his way to the tiny room he was presently about to vacate; logically, he knew that there was nothing on his body at all, that whatever foul grime he saw on his arms and had wiped from his face was little more than an illusion, but it didn’t stop him from marching directly into the dingy bathroom and shoving his head underneath a stream of city water to wash it off.

He needed to leave. He needed to leave immediately, to get away from this stupid fucking town and its stupid fucking alien-clown-shapeshifter bullshit, and he needed to get back to his job where everything was predictable and reasonably safe and—

a door shut somewhere behind him, just loud enough to catch his attention. His head snapped up so quickly that it slammed into the tap, sending water droplets spraying halfway across the floor of the tiny room as he swore and tried to spin around and identify the source with water still streaming over his face.

“Hello?”

There was a flash of movement in the doorway, and for a split second Eddie’s heart leaped into his throat. He expected to see another rotting corpse shamble toward him in the only safe haven he had in this godforsaken building, but it was Richie who emerged from the depths of the room, standing in the doorway with a bag in his hand and a grimace tugging at the corners of his mouth.

“Sorry to interrupt the sponge bath, but are you coming?”

Eddie blinked water out of his eyes. He grabbed a towel from the rack and tried to scrub away the water and black bile, but the towel came away clean. 

He blinked down at it, frowned, then lifted his gaze. “What?”

“I said are you coming with me? I’m getting out of this fucking hellhole, dude.”

Eddie stared, wide-eyed, water still dripping from his hair. Richie did not look nearly as unsettled as he felt, but he spoke in a stage whisper and there was an urgency in his tone that had not been there before. Whatever he’d discovered in search of his own token, it must have fucked him up pretty badly.

“Are you serious?” Eddie hissed back, fumbling to shut off the running tap. “You’re leaving now? What about the plan?”

“Man, Eddie, no offence, but fuck that fucking plan,” Richie said, stepping aside to let Eddie squeeze through the doorway and into the main bedroom. “If I leave here now, I might still have the chance to live my life a little while longer. You know what we’re up against. If we couldn’t kill It before—”

“You heard what Beverly and Mike said, right?” Eddie unzipped one of his suitcases and began to search for a clean set of clothes. If he couldn’t wash off the illusory muck, at least he could change into something that didn’t feel like it was still coated in a layer of sludge. “If we leave now, we won’t even last another couple of decades—”

“Yeah, well, I’ve got shit all planned for my retirement anyway, so at least I can leave here and live my last few years a happy, clown-free man without worrying about being turned into a human lasagna. Maybe that’s Bill’s thing, maybe Mike and Beverly and Ben are all happy to go back and give kicking the bucket a second chance, but don’t you want to have at least a chance at living?”

Eddie paused, still elbow-deep in his suitcase, and glanced sideways. Richie was striding toward him with that same grim expression, adjusting the strap on the bag slung over his shoulder. He straightened up with a clean shirt clutched in his hand and mentally prepared to stand his ground, or to slap-fight Richie over the zipper of his suitcase or the shirt or something similarly childish. “Yeah, Rich, I do, but...”

The rest of his sentence was muffled by Richie’s mouth, and of all the things that suddenly bubbled up within him, plugging his throat as swiftly and unexpectedly as the warmth of Richie’s palms as they framed his face, his strongest feeling was that of regret—specifically, that of having not brushed his teeth immediately upon arrival.

Eddie was prepared for a great many things, and he was pretty damn good at assessing the likelihood of certain outcomes—like certain death, or a childhood friend making unsavoury jabs about his mother—but this one took him entirely by surprise.

And then something clicked.

Richie’s mouth retreated, but his hands remained firm on either side of Eddie’s face. “Listen to me,” he said softly. His face was still barely inches away. He smelled somewhat musty up close, like he’d stepped into a crypt and absorbed some of the dust and spiderwebs. Eddie couldn’t tell if the warmth in his cheeks was from Richie’s hands, or from the sudden moment of clarity that had snapped him back to his childhood like a taut rubber band. “You and the others, you’re the only good goddamn thing to come out of this place, okay? But we can’t stay here any longer. Stanley’s fucking dead, and I know that’s fucking sad and I hate that we were all so fucking caught up in our own shit until now, but if we can’t beat It, maybe we can still find a way to spite that stupid motherfucker.”

“By staying alive,” Eddie whispered.

Richie nodded, the shadow of a smile crossing his face. “By staying alive. And by going so far the fuck away from here that he’ll think we’re dead.”

He dropped his hands and turned toward Eddie’s suitcase, zipping it shut even though Eddie still had a shirt clutched against his chest. Without waiting for a response, Richie yanked the suitcase from the bed and began to shuffle awkwardly toward the door, ignoring the obvious set of wheels and the handle still sticking out of the top.

“C’mon, let’s Meat Loaf this motherfucker.”

Eddie didn’t need any more prompting. He grabbed his other jacket, his bag of toiletries, his second suitcase, his third, smaller suitcase, and a bottle of Advil he’d left sitting on the nightstand in case of emergencies, and followed Richie out the door and toward the back exit.

It took a few minutes to squeeze his luggage into the back seat and trunk of Richie’s Mustang, but they were on the road before anyone even noticed that they were gone.

Eddie kept his phone in one hand and held onto the side of the door with the other as Richie peeled out of the Town House parking lot and onto the street, but while it terrified him to be in the same vehicle as a man who looked like he would only be comfortable (it proficient) behind the wheel after a few fingers of whiskey, he wasn’t so sure that it was Richie’s driving—nor even their secret getaway—that had begun to churn his stomach and made his heart thunder like a racehorse. He was accustomed to attacks of all sorts: anxiety, asthma, panic, and maybe even minor heart attacks, too, but his restlessness felt different here in the soft leather seat of Richie’s car, with the satellite radio screen glowing blue in front of him and Richie’s fingers drumming nervously on the steering wheel; as they tore through the streets of Derry, whipping up the occasional forgotten flyer or coffee cup left to tumble along the road, he realized that it wasn’t the same terrible feeling at all that he’d experienced when he’d entered Derry the night before.

He was going to get out. He and Richie were both going to get out, hitting the highway and racing toward a second start, just like they’d talked about doing when they were teenagers. They would leave Derry and Pennywise and the entire goddamn circus clusterfuck that was the summer of 1989, and he was happy.

He was positively fucking elated.

“What the fuck is that about?” Richie asked suddenly. Eddie looked at him and realized belatedly that he’d been grinning at absolutely nothing, and the thought made him smile even wider. Richie glanced at the road long enough to ensure that they were barreling toward the distant mouth of Derry’s covered bridge and not toward the guard rail that kept most of the cars from nosediving into the river instead, then glanced back at Eddie. He was obviously torn between watching his passenger and the road, which normally would have raised every single red flag Eddie could list about a distracted driver, but Eddie simply could not find it in himself to care.

They were getting further from Neibolt, from the sewers, from corpses that hung suspended in midair and bodies that resurfaced partially eaten.

They were getting further from their friends, too.

“What? Why do you look like that, are you–why’s this funny, what are you smiling at? Man, I swear on your mother’s fucking life that if you’re fake or some kind of shitty clown illusion—”

“Stop the car,” Eddie said as the shadow of the bridge passed overhead and shrouded them in darkness. He hadn’t felt a high like this in so long. He hadn’t thought it possible to be this happy... and yet he couldn’t deny that he was fleeing Derry, abandoning his hometown and the friends he had loved for so long and only just now rediscovered, prepared to put as many miles between himself and certain death as he possibly could and dooming his friends in the process.

His smile began to falter.

“What?”

“I said stop... slow and and stop the fucking car, Richie!”

He expected a protest or a barrage of questions, but the brakes of the Mustang squealed and Eddie felt himself being pushed against the sharp edge of the seat belt. Behind him, his suitcase slid forward and thudded dully against the back of his seat, and as the car came to a swift and uncomfortable stop, dust swirled outside the windows and Richie stared at him, squinting behind his glasses with both hands still on the steering wheel.

“Okay, I didn’t wanna be mean about this, but you’re really starting to freak me out, and I still don’t trust anything a hundred percent in this town, so if you’re not really here you should, uh, please let me fucking know,” Richie said slowly, but Eddie had stopped finding anything Richie said offensive a long time ago. If anything, he now suspected he knew what Richie was truly afraid of.

“We’re leaving them behind,” Eddie said solemnly. The light in front of them that indicated the open mouth of the bridge was closer than the light behind them, only now his adrenaline high had faded and he was left only with the shame and guilt he’d thought he would manage to outrun, and the light at this end of the tunnel felt as much like a death sentence as the light behind them. “We can’t go. We can’t abandon them.”

“Uh, _yeah_, we can.”

Eddie stared at him. Even now, Bill, Ben, Bev, and Mike could be facing unimaginable danger. Every second they spent here, every passing moment spent deliberating on which direction was the right one increased the likelihood of the demise of not only them, the Losers, but others too. Pennywise would keep returning. Children would continue to die, and in time Eddie, like Stan and like the rest of his friends, so fiercely loyal and with lives and loved ones of their own, would perish too.

Eddie took a breath. 

“If you want to leave when all of this is done, if you want to... travel across the country, leave this town in the dust, I’ll go with you,” he said, thinking of Richie’s stubble scraping against his mouth. It sent another flush of warmth through him now, but in the blue glow from the interior display, he doubted Richie would notice. “We can go to New York, or California, or literally any fucking place you wanna go. But if you leave now, I have to get out of this car. I have to go back, Rich. We have the tokens. All we need to do is win.”

Richie gazed at him for a long moment, then leaned forward and rested his forehead against the steering wheel.

“Goddamnit,” he breathed. He lifted his head and let it drop again with a thunk. “This is fucked. This is so fucked. You’re fucked. _I’m_ fucked. We’re all fucked.”

Eddie could feel the hard outline of his inhaler in his pocket, and he wrapped his fingers around it and squeezed hard before reaching for the gear shift.

He slid it into reverse.

Richie must have seen it out of the corner of his eye. He laughed. It sounded as hysterical as Eddie felt, and was somehow all the more comforting for it.

“Well, if I’ve _gotta_ be fucked, I guess I’d rather be fucked with you assholes.”

He straightened up and reached out. His palm was notably more clammy this time (also a comfort, gross and encouraging all at once) but he simply braced his hand against the back of Eddie’s head, radiating a heat that slid down Eddie’s neck and shoulder like fresh blood, and without a word Richie looked back over his shoulder and began to accelerate backward through the wooden tunnel, picking up speed at a dangerous pace in the Mustang that had nearly just delivered them to a worse fate. 

It was hard not to be terrified as they hurtled toward the light, but Eddie had greater fears now than crashing backward through the bridge. He’d faced those before, had stared death down in the form of It’s ugly fucking face and lived more times than any average person should have. He’d emerged on the other side of that darkness once before, and he could sure as fuck do it again. 

The Mustang was thrown into light once more. Richie spun the wheel sharply, shifted gears, and Eddie felt the impact of the car’s back end slamming into the wooden rail before they jolted into forward motion again. A quick glance in the mirror told him that the sturdy plank that had long kept cars in line had snapped and splintered, obliterating a series of engraved initials and names and various profanities and damaging many others irreparably.

Richie simply stared straight ahead. The Mustang roared, an infernal machine delivering them straight back into hell. It sent a shiver down Eddie’s spine, and once more he felt the weight of Richie’s hand on him–this time on his shoulder, and it came with a squeeze that seemed to say ‘Jesus Christ, I hope you’re right about this’.

Eddie hoped he was, too. He knew the odds, and still he would take his chances with the only other people who could feasibly see this through to the end with him. He might still see the other side of that bridge one day, with Richie behind the wheel and the wind at their backs.

He only hoped it would be worth the cost.


End file.
